Debian Weekly News - September 17th, 2001

Another new architecture? Stefan Gybas has requested a new architecture: s390x.
He writes: "s390 is used on IBM mainframes up to G6 (generation 6) and is
based on 31bit addresses (yes, 31 bits, not 32!). The newer models (G7) use
64bit addresses and the architecture is called s390x. Kernels for s390x also
include an 31bit emulation layer, so we can run s390 binaries on s390x." He
also told us that a buildd for s390x is already running, all important
packages are compiled and the installation will be the same as with s390, so
it could even be released with Woody.

Getting isdnlog into Woody. Paul Slootman discovered
a severe problem with the isdnutils package. The reason lies in
a binary-all package depending on an architecture-dependent package which is
not available for all architectures, since it requires supported ISDN hardware
for that architecture. Thus the dependency cannot be satisfied for certain
architectures which locks the package out of Woody.

Call for lintian patches. Sean 'Shaleh' Perry announced that
he's back and asks people who have any beefs or patches to read the
bugtracking system and
submit them accordingly.

Aptitude broken with HTTP. Daniel Burrows wrote that
he broke aptitude and doesn't want people telling him. Well... The HTTP method
breaks badly when run from aptitude. It's a known problem which originates in
the apt libraries, allegedly. Daniel will upload a workaround soon. Please
don't send tons of bug reports about it or he will have to deal with merging
bug reports instead of dealing with the workaround.

Alternatives in Build-Dependencies. Bdale Garbee has
discovered
that the current way the buildd handles alternatives in Build-Depends is
somewhat suboptimal. The sbuild which buildd uses will always
use the first option. Maintainers who use alternatives in Build-Depends
should be aware of this fact when they start using such alternatives. Anthony
Towns has added some descriptive scenarios.

Personal Package Builder. Junichi Uekawa has announced
pbuilder, a personal builder for Debian packages. It is a convenient program
to create a chroot system, and build Debian packages inside of it. Our buildd
systems use a component (sbuild) which also build packages.
However, sbuild focuses on building a package for buildd, while
pbuilder focuses on integrating the process of building a chroot environment
(debootstrap) and compiling Debian packages. Version 0.3 has already entered
the archive.

Overclocking Tips. Rajesh Fowkar is looking for advice
on overclocking an Asus motherboard and Celeron CPU. Seems that the machine
has some issues with compiling a kernel.

FAI 2.2 was released on Sunday. Thomas Lange
announced that Fully Automatic Installation 2.2 was ready to go. FAI
is a non-interactive system for adding Debian GNU/Linux machines to
a cluster.

Yum, new boot-floppies! Adam Di Carlo
announced that version 3.0.14 of the boot floppies are available for
testing for powerpc and i386. Hammer on them and send reports, comments or praise
to debian-boot@lists.debian.org.

Evils of /usr/share/java/repository. Does the current
setup for Java in Debian leave something to be desired? There's a
discussion on the Debian-Java mailing list about Java classpaths. Apparently
Java Policy is being looked at, so any interested Debian Java users and developers
might want to follow this discussion and possibly join in.

New dpkg-deb Feature. Wichert Akkerman has
added a showformat feature for dpkg-deb. It's now in CVS for anyone that is
interested in getting their hands on it.

New Packages. This a short list of a few of the
new and noteworthy packages for Debian this week. Note that this is
by no means an all-inclusive list or in any way a snub against any
packages not mentioned. Any maintainer who releases a package that
they'd like to call attention to should send us a note. Any maintainer
that gripes after the fact that his or her package was ignored
will be summarily ignored or ridiculed.

dpsyco -- System configuration packages, to be used to add users,
groups, patches and more.

mantis -- Mantis is a Web-based bugtracking system that uses PHP
and MySQL.